The Bletchley Park Bombe was later refined by another Bletchley Park codebreaker Gordon Welchman and actually built outside Bletchley Park by engineer Harold Keen. Turing’s design for the Bombe used at Bletchley built on that of the original Polish Bomba, which had been produced by Marian Rejewski in 1938. “The story running through the film of one main codebreaker, Turing, with a team of four or five, producing a machine that won the war, is a ridiculous oversimplification of what actually happened,” she wrote.Īs Dr Black points out, the Bombe and its role in cracking Enigma-coded messages stemmed from the work of a series of individuals. More than 8,000 women and about 2,000 men worked for the Government Code and Cypher School in the grounds of Bletchley Park during the Second World War, and while Turing’s contribution was certainly immense, he was one of many.ĭramatic licence is to be expected, but in her review Dr Sue Black, computer scientist and author of Saving Bletchley Park, describes the portrayal of how Turing built the Bombe, the electromechanical machine used to help decipher Nazi military communications, as “completely inaccurate”. (Beware spoilers) Why you might want to give The Imitation Game a miss 1. For those undecided about whether to see the film here are both sides of the argument.
The film has garnered many positive reviews, but also some trenchant criticism. Turing’s story is due to hit cinema screens in the US next week with the release of The Imitation Game, which sees Benedict Cumberbatch take the lead role. The act deeply affected Turing and is thought to have contributed to his decision to kill himself. Less happy is the story of how Turing was persecuted for being gay, forced by the state to undergo a so-called chemical castration. Just as importantly, he played a key role in a UK code-breaking operation credited for shortening the Second World War by deciphering Nazi communications and providing crucial intelligence to the Allied forces. Decades before the onset of the information age, Turing conceived what he called a “universal machine”, a concept that laid the groundwork for today’s PCs and smartphones. Here are the top reasons both to see and to avoid the film - due to open in the US next week.īritish mathematician Alan Turing is known as the father of modern computing. The Imitation Game tells the story of Alan Turing, the brilliant mathematician and father of computing. Why you should watch The Imitation Game and why you might want to skip it
0 kommentar(er)
